Jabotinsky (Jewish Lives) by Hillel Halkin

Author:Hillel Halkin [Halkin, Hillel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-05-26T21:00:00+00:00

4

Racing the Clock

THE SHAW COMMISSION report led to the Passfield White Paper of October 1930. Openly pro-Arab, the White Paper amounted to an all but total abandonment of the Balfour Declaration. It called for Jewish immigration to Palestine to be severely curtailed; for all Jewish land purchases to be ended; for the new Jewish Agency to be denied special rights or powers by the Mandate administration in Jerusalem; and for the Zionist leadership to renounce “the independent and separatist ideals which have been developed in some quarters in regard to the Jewish national home”—in other words, to give up all hope for a Jewish state.

The Arabs celebrated. The Jews protested. Weizmann resigned as head of the Zionist Organization. Jabotinsky demanded that the Palestine mandate be returned by Great Britain to the League of Nations for reassignment to another country, possibly Italy, England’s rival for hegemony in the Mediterranean. The Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald, faced with pro-Zionist sentiment in its ranks and in Parliament, backtracked by shelving the White Paper and appointing a new high commissioner for Palestine, General Arthur Wauchope, who was more sympathetic to Zionism. Now the Jews celebrated and the Arabs protested. It was a typical British zigzag that concluded with the restoration of a status quo with which no one had been happy.

Yet within the Zionist movement, the last vestiges of confidence in England’s reliability had been eroded. What had been decided in London in contravention of all prior British-Zionist understandings and reversed under pressure could be reversed again under counter-pressure. Weizmann’s policy of trust in British intentions now seemed naive even to his backers, and he only exacerbated his situation by defending England with the claim that a Jewish state in Palestine, as opposed to a “productive, autonomous Jewish society” there, had never been Zionism’s aim to begin with. His General Zionist supporters were greatly weakened. In hard-fought elections for the seventeenth Zionist Congress, held in Basel in the summer of 1931, they won only 84 of 254 seats. The Labor Zionists captured 75 seats, with Achdut ha-Avodah and Ha-Po’el ha-Tsa’ir now united as Mapai, a Hebrew acronym for Mifleget Po’alei Eretz-Yisra’el, “The Workers Party of the Land of Israel.” The biggest gainers were the Revisionists, who tripled their strength to 52 delegates and 20 percent of the vote.

The congress was a volatile one. The Revisionists introduced an anti-Weizmann motion declaring a Jewish state to be Zionism’s goal. Mapai joined the General Zionists in rejecting it as an unnecessary provocation of the British and Arabs. Jabotinsky stood on a chair, tore up his delegate’s card, shouted, “This is not a Zionist congress,” and was carried out of the hall on Revisionist shoulders. Weizmann then fumbled his victory by stating in a newspaper interview that he had “no understanding or sympathy” even for the objective of a simple Jewish majority in Palestine. This was too much for many of his supporters as well. Passing him by, they voted with Mapai, against Revisionist opposition, to elect his follower Nachum Sokolov as the Zionist Organization’s new president.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.